"At close quarters, too!" observed Mr. Bradford. "They must have stood their ground like Spartans." And nothing would do, after the game was skinned and the supper of tender bear-cub meat eaten that evening, but the boys must tell, to the least detail, how the bears were killed .

"All I have to say," said Uncle Will, as he re-lighted his pipe when they had finished, "is that you deserve great credit for pluck, but very little for prudence. Next time, my lads, just let us know when you start out after bears."

of hard work to transport the contents of the cache at the lake by frequent trips to the claims ten miles away. The tents were pitched on the grassy top of the bank from which Uncle Will had panned the gold in April. In the Kah Sha gorge there yet remained a few old drifts of snow which dwindled day by day, but under the influence of the almost incessant sunlight, vegetation was everywhere springing fresh and green.

There were now seven members of the Thirty-six—no longer mysterious—encamped in the gorge hardly a mile above its entrance, under the leadership of Moran, a gray-haired veteran of the Civil War, who was the only practical miner among them. The rest, like the majority of men who entered Alaska and the Northwest in the great rush of 1898, were drawn from other walks of life neostrata gel plus. One had been a railroad brakeman, another a railroad clerk, a third an ice-man, a fourth a travelling salesman, a fifth a farmer, and the sixth a steamboat man. The occupations represented were still more numerous when Pennocks men arrived[211] several days behind the Bradfords, Pennock himself having gone out to the coast. One of these had been a grocer, another a foreman employed by a gas company, and another a journalist.

Still further accessions were made from time to time, as men were sent back from the camps beyond Pennocks, till Morans Camp became a bustling and populous place. A log cabin was built for a kitchen, dining-room, and storehouse, and half a dozen tents were set up for sleeping quarters. This little settlement was situated in a wild and rugged spot, bounded in front and at the sides by the roaring, foaming torrent of the Kah Sha River. Directly at the rear rose foot-hills, and beyond them a high mountain, while from the waters edge across the stream frowned an enormous perpendicular cliff of dark rock three hundred feet high, from which not infrequently a mass of crumbling débris came crashing down. The sun now rose over the mountain to the east at about nine oclock and set behind this cliff at four, after which the gorge was always chill and damp endocare ampoules.

The Thirty-six had located their claims along the river and on Alder Creek. They had found numerous colors of gold in the gravel of the hillside which they had levelled for the cabin, and operations for taking out the gold were actively begun. As soon as the cabin was finished, the men turned to whip-sawing boards from spruce logs, nailing the boards together in[212] the form of sluice-boxes, and digging prospect-holes here and there along the streams to find the most promising spot.